Cloudinary's image management service is used by thousands of world-wide websites and mobile apps. For many of our clients, Cloudinary has become a central, mission-critical component used for managing image uploads, transformations and delivery.
Call us prejudice, but as a hardcore Linux guys, the name Microsoft always caused us to flinch a little. That was our initial reaction when we were approached by the Azure team. We have been integrating Cloudinary with many PaaS providers to make our platform as accessible as possible, and Azure actually made perfect sense. Still, we were a bit hesitant at first as we never considered Microsoft a leading player in the world of rapid web & mobile development.
As Cloudinary continues to grow, the number of companies using Cloudinary to manage their images grows with us. Each company has its own unique product and utilizes Cloudinary in a different, fascinating way. In this post, we wanted to introduce you to several cool startup companies, and with them, the many different ways that Cloudinary’s services can be used.
Since its inception, one of Cloudinary's main pillars was to always be there for our customers. Every question you ever asked us helped us better understand what image solutions are most important to you. Every support request helped us find and fix gaps in our product and our documentation. Nearly every feature request we got was immediately given top priority and helped us shape Cloudinary into the service it is today. Without a doubt, we owe much of Cloudinary's success today to the amount of open communication we have going with our community.
More and more developers are getting to know the power of the cloud. In today's web application development world you can leverage the cloud to build large scale applications so quickly and easily that it's simply mind-boggling that you get all of this while still keeping on a very reasonable budget.
Modifying an image opacity so the image is semi-transparent is a common requirement when implementing modern graphics design. Reducing image opacity allows background images to feel less dominant. Reducing opacity also allows layering of multiple images one on top of the other, an important step when adding watermarks, badges and textual overlays to images.
In a previous post we've shown how you can easily manage your Ruby on Rails image uploads with CarrierWave and Cloudinary. Many of our Rails readers found this very useful, as it depicted a powerful image management solution that is trivial to integrate - use the popular CarrierWave GEM together with the Cloudinary GEM, add a single 'include' line to your code and that's it. All your images are automatically uploaded to the cloud and delivered through a fast CDN. Better yet, all image transformations defined in your CarrierWave uploader class are generated in the cloud by Cloudinary. No need to install and setup any image processing library (goodbye RMagick, ImageMagick, GraphicsMagick, MiniMagick, etc.). You also don't need to worry any more about CPU power, storage space, image syncing between multiple servers, backup and scale.
This blog post is not like our regular techie oriented blog post, this blog post is about you guys, our users. Call it the holidays' spirit, but lately we have been having a strong urge to say thanks. Thanks to our awesome users.
Graphic designers often contemplate whether to add borders to their website elements. The decision of whether to add borders around frames, buttons and text elements really depends on the feeling the designer is trying to convey through the design.
When images are involved, web developers have a large set of relevant tools at their disposal. You can display images in your web sites and mobile applications. You can transform and transform such images using image editing and transformation software or cloud-based solutions like Cloudinary. But there are other types of data embedded in image files that can add unique semantic information to the images and are hardly ever used.